Technology | The Guardian

Digital currency must be subject to measures such as stress tests to gain approvalThe Bank of England has hardened its stance on Facebook’s Libra digital currency, telling the social media company it must meet its highest standards to get the green light for launch in Britain.In its toughest intervention to date, the central bank’s financial policy committee (FPC) said digital currencies such as Libra would need to reach the same high standards as those of traditional payments. Continue reading...

In court documents, Tesla CEO says he regrets attacking man who helped save young soccer players trapped in underwater caveElon Musk has claimed he was fooled by the investigator he hired to get dirt on a British diver, according to new court documents.“I’m a fucking idiot,” Musk said, according to documents surfaced in court on Tuesday, in the latest development in a bizarre defamation case brought against the Tesla CEO over comments made in 2018. Continue reading...

A cracking camera, great screen and 32-hour battery life – but at an eye-watering priceApple’s iPhone has gone “pro” for its 11th iteration, with dramatically improved cameras and longer battery life, which make the smaller iPhone 11 Pro the king of more manageable phones.Costing from £1,049 the iPhone 11 Pro is one of a rare breed: a premium flagship smartphone that doesn’t have a ginormous screen and is therefore small by today’s standards. Continue reading...

(House House; Panic Inc; Switch, PC, Mac)

Kamala Harris urged Twitter’s CEO to ban Trump. Is she right, or would it amount to an assault on free speech?Should Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world, be banned from Twitter?Kamala Harris thinks so. On Tuesday she sent a letter to Twitter’s chief executive arguing that Trump has been violating the platform’s user agreement. Harris pointed to recent tweets Trump had sent harassing the Ukraine whistleblower and the House intelligence committee chairman, Adam Schiff, as well as Trump’s tweet threatening civil war. Continue reading...

Self-driving vehicles reach UK milestone with first demo in ‘complex urban environment’ in StratfordWork to bring driverless cars to Britain’s streets has reached a milestone with the first demonstration of an autonomous fleet driving in a “complex urban environment” in London.Ford Mondeos fitted with autonomous technology from the UK tech firm Oxbotica operated on public roads around the former Olympic Park in Stratford this week. Directors of the £13.6m Driven programme, a partially government-funded consortium, said it had “exceeded their initial plan” and was a significant step in confirming autonomous vehicles could operate in real-life situations in a large European city. Continue reading...

According to a new study, two-thumb texters are almost as fast as keyboard users. We take to the streets to see if the public are up to speedThe human thumb, being opposable, is a blessed thing: we can hold a pen, send a text or play thumb war as the mood takes us. Today’s digital natives will have learned to type before they crawl, and are capable of bashing out a “Hey, you up?” text faster than the brain can process that it is a bad decision. But not everyone is as lightning-fast: all of us know a one-finger typer, whether it is the co-worker who takes an eternity to reply to an email, or the beloved grandparent who pauses every few seconds.For the most part, we have typed faster on computer keyboards than phone screens – until now. A study of more than 37,000 volunteers from 160 countries has found that people can type almost as quickly on a screen as they can on a keyboard. Those who used two thumbs were able to type on average 38 words a minute - making them just 25% slower than the average computer keyboard user. We took to the streets to put the study to the test and find out how fast the general public could type the same three-sentence, 38-word phrase (lifted, of course, from a Guardian article on the UK economy). Move over Mavis Beacon: the keyboard is dead. Long live the phone screen. Continue reading...

Despite an extensive incident report, Australian National University is unable to say who is behind the cyber-attackMedia reports blaming China for a massive data breach at the Australian National University revealed in June 2019 are speculative and “harmful” because the university has been unable to establish the motivation and attribution for the attack, its chief has said.The ANU vice-chancellor, Brian Schmidt, made the comments to Guardian Australia on Wednesday, ahead of the release of an extensive incident report. Continue reading...

Leaked recordings published by the Verge show Zuckerberg fears ‘existential threat’ if Democratic contender becomes presidentFacebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said his company will “go to the mat” if Elizabeth Warren is elected president and seeks to fulfil her promise to break up America’s tech giants.Related: Trump impeachment: public support grows as scandal widens – live news Continue reading...

Apple’s lower cost model has latest chips and longer battery life but is identical on outside to predecessorThe iPhone 11 is Apple’s latest lower cost smartphone for 2019 that’s clearly aimed at a broader market, offering most of what its top phones do but for £320 less.Costing from £729, the iPhone 11 is also £20 cheaper than last year’s iPhone XR was on launch – the phone it has now replaced. Continue reading...

The latest crossover from DS is certainly stylish. The only question is have you got what it takes to carry it off?DS 3 Crossback

Lucie Morris-Marr, Andrew Bolt and a splash turned sour. Plus, the predictable parade of hate for Greta ThunbergLucie Morris-Marr, the first journalist to reveal that Victoria police were investigating George Pell over allegations of child abuse, has detailed in her new book what she endured at the Herald Sun after breaking the story on the tabloid’s front page.In Fallen: the inside story of the secret trial and conviction of Cardinal George Pell, Morris-Marr says elation over her scoop quickly turned sour, and she ended up suffering from severe stress after attacks from Pell and her colleague Andrew Bolt. Continue reading...

Chinese-owned social media app bans such content even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegalTikTok’s efforts to provide locally sensitive moderation have resulted in it banning any content that could be seen as positive to gay people or gay rights, down to same-sex couples holding hands, even in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal, the Guardian can reveal.The rules were applied on top of the general moderation guidelines, first reported by the Guardian on Wednesday, which included a number of clauses that banned speech that touched on topics sensitive to China, including Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Falun Gong. ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok, says the moderation guidelines were replaced in May. Continue reading...

Hollywood star is the first celebrity voice to be rolled out on the virtual personal assistantInteractions with Amazon’s virtual personal assistant Alexa could soon become considerably more entertaining – and profane – after actor Samuel L Jackson signed up to lend his voice to the device.The Hollywood star is the first celebrity voice to be rolled out on Alexa, in a feature that will be made available to users later this year for a fee, according an announcement by the tech and retail giant on Wednesday. Continue reading...

There are dangers of teaching computers to learn the things humans do best – not least because makers of such machines cannot explain the knowledge their creations have acquiredBrad Smith, Microsoft’s president, last week told the Guardian that tech companies should stop behaving as though everything that is not illegal is acceptable. Mr Smith made a good argument that technology may be considered morally neutral but technologists can’t be. He is correct that software engineers ought to take much more seriously the moral consequences of their work.This argument operates on two levels: conscious and unconscious. It is easy to see the ethical issue that appeared to arise when, as a result of a series of its own confusing blog posts, Microsoft appeared to be selling facial recognition technology to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement while the Trump administration was separating children from parents at the US’s southern border. This was, as Microsoft later confirmed, false. The moral stance of more than 3,000 Google employees who protested about its Maven contract – where machine learning was to be used for military purposes, starting with drone imaging – with the US Department of Defense should be applauded. Google let the contract lapse. But people with different ethical viewpoints can take different views. In the case of the Maven contract, a rival with fewer qualms picked up the work. Much is contingent on public attitudes. Opinion polls show that Americans are not in favour of developing artificial intelligence technology for warfare, but this changes as soon as the country’s adversaries start to develop them. There is an economic aspect to be considered too. Shoshana Zuboff’s insight, that the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users is capitalism’s latest stage, is key. What is our moral state when AI researchers are paid $1m a year but the people who label and classify the input data are paid $1.47 an hour. Continue reading...

A new California law will finally give thousands of misclassified workers the rights and protections that everyone deservesHave you ever taken a ride using the Lyft app? There’s a chance I drove you.I’ve worked in the gig economy for over four years, mostly as a Lyft driver. I started driving to make money during my hour-long commute to work. When I lost my full time job, Lyft became my primary source of income. Continue reading...

Dutch firm asks £200 above the norm for a smartphone that might help change the industryWhat if you could buy a phone that will last five years, can be easily repaired and is made as ethically as possible? That’s the aim of the latest Fairphone 3 – and on many counts it succeeds.Ethically creating a phone is a lot harder than it may sound, but you have to start somewhere. Amsterdam-based Fairphone turned from an awareness campaign about conflict minerals into a phone company in 2013, and aims to source as many materials as possible in both human and environmentally kind ways. Continue reading...

From Switzerland to Singapore, police, fire and ambulance departments are laying down their tools, and their bodies, to take part in a new craze

Proposal put to internet service providers earlier this year would have targeted high-volume users of video streaming servicesNBN Co has shot down an idea for a “Netflix tax” for high-volume users of video streaming services, as the company also looks to target people holding out from moving on to the NBN because it is too expensive.In a proposal put to internet service providers earlier this year, NBN suggested breaking out how streaming video traffic was treated in NBN’s wholesale pricing, with media reports at the time labelling the suggestion as a “Netflix tax” aimed to address the growing demand for streaming video on the NBN. Continue reading...

As London’s iconic shopping street gets ready to celebrate its 200th anniversary, you can get into the spirit with one of the country’s largest free car showsRegent Street Motor Show

Lo-fi videos about life on the road also fill blindspot travel industry has in catering for women of colourThe YouTube channel of a 21-year-old woman who lives in a van with her pet snake Alfredo is at the centre of a debate about race, travel and gender in the online world.Jennelle Eliana’s channel, which documents her day-to-day existence as a “vanlifer”, has become an internet phenomenon after gaining 1.9 million subscribers since June. Continue reading...

Vlogger embraced by far right apologizes for planned donation to Anti-Defamation League, after fans claim conspiracyYouTuber Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg has withdrawn a $50,000 pledge to an anti-hate group, which he had dedicated as a means of atoning for past accusations of racism and antisemitism, after backlash from his fans.The Swedish vlogger had promised funds received from a sponsorship deal to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a not-for-profit organization that fights antisemitism. But he apologized to fans, who had been developing conspiracy theories that he had been pressured to make the donation, in a video uploaded on Thursday. Continue reading...

Mariela Castro and state media journalists were also blocked in move Cuban Union of Journalists called ‘massive censorship’Twitter has blocked the accounts of the Cuban Communist party leader Raúl Castro, his daughter Mariela Castro and Cuba’s top state-run media outlets, a move the Cuban Union of Journalists denounced as “massive censorship”.Related: Cuba is driving dissidents off island with threats of violence and jail, report finds Continue reading...

An essay about an Instagram influencer and an intense female friendship that turned toxic is blowing up online. One Guardian Australia staffer asks another to explain what it means … quicklyHi Alyx. Who is Caroline Calloway, and why could no one stop talking about her at the pub last night?Caroline Calloway is the subject of an intense, emotionally complex long read in New York Magazine’s the Cut. It was written by her former close friend and ghostwriter Natalie Beach, and now the internet can’t stop talking about her – largely because Calloway herself can’t stop talking about the article. Continue reading...

11 September 1969: Robots could be used as slaves, to do the things human beings do not want to do, hears the International Congress of Industrial DesignRobots might do repetitive housework, such as cleaning, scrubbing, and washing-up, but it was unlikely they would do creative work such as cooking, Professor Meredith W. Thring, professor of mechanical engineering, Queen Mary College, London, said yesterday.Related: Robot kills factory worker: From the archive, 9 December 1981 Continue reading...

Latest developments in the pipeline for those struggling with mobility, sight, hearing or speechNine years ago, David Mzee was left paralysed by a gymnastics accident and told he would never walk again. Last week, he competed in a charity run during which he walked 390 metres, thanks to an experimental treatment that uses electrical stimulation of the spinal cord to rejuvenate dormant circuits in patients whose spinal breaks are not complete. Continue reading...

The MIT-Epstein debacle shows ‘the prostitution of intellectual activity’. Time for a radical agenda: close the Media Lab, disband Ted Talks and refuse tech billionaires moneyAs the world wakes up to the power of big tech, we get to hear – belatedly – of all the damage wrought by the digital giants. Most of these debates, alas, don’t veer too far from the policy-oriented realms of economics or law. Now that the big technocracy wants to quash big tech, expect more such wonkery.What, however, about the ideas that feed big tech? For one, we are no longer in 2009: Mark Zuckerberg’s sophomoric musings on transparency or the global village impress very few. Continue reading...

AI and brain-scanning technology could soon make it possible to reliably detect when people are lying. But do we really want to know? By Amit KatwalaWe learn to lie as children, between the ages of two and five. By adulthood, we are prolific. We lie to our employers, our partners and, most of all, one study has found, to our mothers. The average person hears up to 200 lies a day, according to research by Jerry Jellison, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. The majority of the lies we tell are “white”, the inconsequential niceties – “I love your dress!” – that grease the wheels of human interaction. But most people tell one or two “big” lies a day, says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. We lie to promote ourselves, protect ourselves and to hurt or avoid hurting others.The mystery is how we keep getting away with it. Our bodies expose us in every way. Hearts race, sweat drips and micro-expressions leak from small muscles in the face. We stutter, stall and make Freudian slips. “No mortal can keep a secret,” wrote the psychoanalyst in 1905. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Continue reading...

Companies are creating new devices and apps to mine seniors’ golden years and address the challenges of growing olderSilicon Valley has long sought to disrupt virtually every aspect of modern life. Now comes technology’s final frontier: old age. Tech that’s specifically designed for seniors is a growing market, fueled by inexorable demographic trends – about 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day.Senior tech is increasingly showing up in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. A company called It’s Never Too Late proffers a massive 70in high-definition touchscreen computer that provides older people with little prior tech experience easy access to everything from travel videos and music playlists to a library of college lectures. Paro, a robotic seal stuffed with sensors and actuators that react to voice, light and touch, is being used to help those experiencing memory loss and social withdrawal. A movie system called 3Scape provides immersive 3D filmed content for the elderly and mobility-challenged in order to stimulate cognitive function and relieve depression and anxiety. Continue reading...

Surveillance software switched off at prestigious development after backlashFacial recognition technology will not be deployed at the King’s Cross development in the future, following a backlash prompted by the site owner’s admission last month that the software had been used in its CCTV systems.The developer behind the prestigious central London site said the surveillance software had been used between May 2016 and March 2018 in two cameras on a busy pedestrian street running through its heart. Continue reading...

Up to 10 million people in the UK are in precarious work, juggling low paid jobs as cleaners, Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers. But a movement is under way to rewire the economy from withinFatima, from Guinea-Bissau, wakes up in the early hours of the morning to be in with a chance of being able to use the bathroom at her small house in Stratford, east London, which she shares with nine strangers – some are Italian, she thinks, and some might be eastern European, but nobody socialises as they are all too busy working, so she can’t really be sure. Almost every possession Fatima owns remains permanently packed in two large suitcases, because she knows what the landlord is capable of: he demands payments in cash and retains a personal key to every room. “When he throws me out on to the street, I’ll be ready,” she explains. By 6.30am she’s on the tube and heading to the Ministry of Justice headquarters near St James’s Park for the first of two jobs. Over the next nine hours she will walk up and down 16 floors of UK government office space, cleaning each of the male and female toilets on every floor five times per working day. She will walk for miles and miles, until 5pm, when she will walk down the road for half a mile more, and begin another set of cleaning rounds – this time at the supreme court. For all this, she will be paid £7.83 per hour, the legal minimum wage for her age. By the time she gets home, it will be past 9pm, and she will be exhausted. “It isn’t any kind of life,” she says.But today is a different kind of life. Today, she is spinning in the middle of a Westminster pavement as rain pours from the sky, with glitter on her face and strips of ticker tape in her hair. She is blowing a horn and dancing deliriously, flanked by a line of security guards on one side and police officers on the other. The air is thick with music and shouting and flare smoke and promise, and Fatima, 55, is at the heart of it all. Continue reading...

US court orders Craig Wright to share cryptocurrency haul with the estate of American programmer David KleimanThe Australian man who claimed to have invented cryptocurrency bitcoin has been ordered to hand over half of his alleged bitcoin holdings, reported to be worth up to $5bn.The IT security consultant Craig Wright, 49, was sued by the estate of David Kleiman, a programmer who died in 2013, for a share of Wright’s bitcoin haul over the pair’s involvement in the inception of the cryptocurrency from 2009 to 2013. Continue reading...

Forget sponsoring Bob in accounts to run a charity marathon: these days you can ask anyone for anythingIwan Carrington wanted AirPods but he couldn’t afford them, and for most 16-year-old boys that’s where the story would end. Since their release in December 2016, Apple’s £199 wireless Bluetooth earbuds have become a status symbol among teens: after all, only the wealthy can afford tiny, untethered headphones that are so easy to lose. As an ordinary Welsh schoolboy, Carrington wasn’t rich enough to buy them, and he was growing increasingly jealous of his friend’s pair. So in January this year, he came up with a solution.With just a few clicks on his computer, Carrington created a page on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe, set a fundraising goal of £100 (he had saved the rest from Christmas), and titled it simply and honestly: “I am desperate for AirPods. Help a brother out.” The plea was simple and unvarnished: “I am like any other teenager except I would love some Apple AirPods. I was sat on the bus untangling my earphone wires and thought how great it would be to have AirPods. I ask for any help. Please.” The first comment underneath was similarly direct: “This is a shameless act of self-promotion. I totally support it.” Eight donors and a few days later, Carrington had raised the money he needed. Continue reading...

Wall Street Journal found that more than 4,000 items for sale on Amazon have been declared unsafe by federal agenciesAmazon has removed hundreds of toxic and unsafe products from its site after a Wall Street Journal report found thousands of listings from third-party sellers don’t comply with federal safety standards. Thousands of problematic products remain.More than 4,000 items for sale on Amazon have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, including 2,000 listings for children’s toys and medications. The Journal also identified 157 items Amazon had already banned still listed on the site, and one product it tested had lead levels that exceed federal limits. Continue reading...

Readers respond to Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s piece about selfie culture in art galleriesI was pleased to read Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s criticism of selfie culture – every aspect of life has been gatecrashed by the mobile phone (Art, aura and the search for a perfect selfie, 22 August). However, as John Berger pointed out in Ways of Seeing (indebted to Walter Benjamin), the withering of the aura of a work of art is to be celebrated, because aura shrouds the work of art in a veil of false religiosity.Many modern artworks, such as those in film and photography (media that Benjamin advocated), are no longer necessarily unique one-offs. The fact that film is reproducible and distributed en masse does not adversely affect our viewing. I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this week knowing that other copies of the film were being watched in cinemas internationally. In other words, the artwork – if you would agree that film can be an artwork – does not require the quality of one-offness to be valued. If a thing is appreciated simply for its uniqueness, which is more or less attributable to many things, not just artworks, there are other factors being overlooked. The gallery provides a space for the viewer to interact with the work on both a physical and mental – conceptual – level. Considerations of cultural contexts and history play a part. Anyone looking at their phone in a gallery shouldn’t have bothered leaving the house; they brought the house with them. My gallery-going advice: switch off the phone, dump the aura and get lost.

There are regional variations in how easy it is to pass your practical driving test – but there is also the theory part. Could you still pass?Newly released figures show that there are some areas of the country where it appears to be much easier to pass your driving test than others. But, regardless of where you take the practical test, would-be drivers in Great Britain are required to take a theory test as well before getting their driving licence.But, once we are out on the road, not all of us can remember every detail. And some of us started driving long enough ago that the theory test didn’t exist. Continue reading...

PlayStation 4; Flavourworks/Sony

Badiucao accuses the social media firm of violating the free speech of people who speak up against China’s bullyingA Melbourne artist who posted anti-Chinese government work has had it pulled offline by Instagram, while death threats against him have remained uncensored.The censorship of Badiucao – and later restoration – by Instagram came as Twitter and Facebook suspended more than 200,000 accounts deemed to be part of a “co-ordinated state-backed operation” of misinformation from the People’s Republic of China. Continue reading...

A study claims that adding emojis to communications allowed people to reach a deeper level of intimacy with one anotherName: Sexy emojis.Appearance: Irresistible. Continue reading...

Bluetooth earbuds have long battery life, rock-solid connectivity and stay firmly planted on your earThe PowerBeats Pro are Apple-owned Beats’ first true wireless Bluetooth earbuds that cut the cable and seek to be the ultimate running and gym earphones.As with Apple’s original AirPods, which looked like a set of the firm’s standard EarPods with the cables cut off, the £220 PowerBeats Pro are basically the firm’s popular PowerBeats 3 neckband Bluetooth earbuds without the cables joining the pair. Continue reading...

The best camera in the mid-range market, backed by good performance and long battery lifeThe Honor 20 Pro is the new flagship phone for Huawei’s cheaper offshoot, offering some of what made the Chinese firm the camera master but at £550 it is a little overpriced.The Honor 20 Pro is essentially the same phone as the £400 Honor 20 with a better camera on the back, a slightly larger battery and more storage. It was meant to be released alongside its cheaper sibling, but Donald Trump’s Huawei blockade caused it to be delayed. Continue reading...

Sadiq Khan raises concerns after development admits using technology in its CCTVThe mayor of London has written to the owner of the King’s Cross development demanding to know whether the company believes its use of facial recognition software in its CCTV systems is legal.Sadiq Khan said he wanted to express his concern a day after the property company behind the 27-hectare (67-acre) central London site admitted it was using the technology “in the interests of public safety”. Continue reading...

Creator of video says he wants to raise awareness of technology's potential in age of fake news and doctored footage

Site’s shutdown in wake of El Paso shooting likely to drive users to other, similar sites – as well as mainstream social mediaFormer members of 8chan have scattered across the internet after the far-right site was shut down over the weekend, finding new homes in other rightwing sites, on encrypted messaging services, and on major social media platforms.8chan went dark this week after the security service provider Cloudflare terminated the extremist messaging board as one of its clients following the El Paso shooting. Continue reading...

Cybersecurity firm FireEye says ‘aggressive’ APT41 group working for Beijing is also hacking video games to make moneyA group of state-sponsored hackers in China ran activities for personal gain at the same time as undertaking spying operations for the Chinese government in 14 different countries, the cybersecurity firm FireEye has said.In a report released on Thursday, the company said the hacking group APT41 was different to other China-based groups tracked by security firms in that it used non-public malware typically reserved for espionage to make money through attacks on video game companies. Continue reading...

After being reported for illegally renting out her home, one California woman took revenge with a mural, neighbors sayA California woman’s decision to plaster emojis on her outside walls, a move neighbors say came after they reported her for renting out her home on Airbnb, has made headlines around the world. But the war in Manhattan Beach, a city in southern California, sums up a wider problem for neighborhoods transformed by the tech platform: what happens if your neighbors hate it?Neighborly disputes over Airbnb and other home-share properties are frequent, said Dan Weber, the founder of Airbnb Hell, a website that collects horror stories from hosts, renters and neighbors of Airbnb homes. Continue reading...

Rosette Pambakian says she was fired after she complained about alleged 2016 attack by Gregory BlattAn ex-executive at dating site Tinder has sued the company and says she was sexually assaulted by its former CEO.The lawsuit filed on Monday in Los Angeles superior court said Rosette Pambakian was fired from her job as marketing vice-president after complaining about the alleged 2016 incident. Continue reading...

Three attackers in six months allegedly posted their plans on the site in advance. Why is it allowed to operate openly?